A couple goes to the theater. Ten minutes into the show they know that it is a bad movie but neither of them is prepared to admit it. Fifteen minutes later one of them says: “it’s a bad movie. Shall we leave?” The other replies: “Why should we lose three times? First we paid, second it’s a bad movie and now you want us to leave before the end?”

In many situations it is perfectly fine to stop in the middle, to not prolong a mistake, to not extend unnecessary irritation or suffering. Everyone can make a mistake; it’s more of a mistake to devotedly hold on to it. The foolishness comes in thinking you have to punish yourself by putting more time into what is either not working, not a good use of your time, or has exceeded its shelf life.

Here are few things that you can simply stop (without breaking any law):
1. A bad movie or an annoying play
2. An aimless chat
3. A noisy party that has gone on too long
4. A meeting that already met its objectives
5. A conference call that accomplished its goals
6. An endeavor that has lost its purpose

If you are to be great, to be the best you can be – you have to learn to say no to the follow on punishment, you have to make space for greatness.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.06.2008 :: Personal Growth :: No Comments »

Never run to the bottom of the tank. It is the most dangerous thing that you can do. When you use yourself to the very last drop of energy and willingness, you start using up a precious energy that was not meant to be used. The last drop of energy is a crucial safety reservoir to be retained for self maintenance, to fuel your recovery and daily replenishment. Running to the bottom and then running on empty is dangerous. You make yourself brittle and susceptible to illness.

Make it a point to notice the red light on your energy dashboard.  Work on building your resilience and recoverability reservoirs. Never run Empty.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Sep.17.2008 :: Know Thyself, Personal Growth, Tough Times :: No Comments »

Good times present great opportunities. Tough times present a great many opportunities too. How do you approach challenging times? What opportunities do you find in tough times?
Here are ten things you can do in tough times:

1. Learn new skills.
2. Take time to explore ideas, places and possibilities that looked impossible previously.
3. Stay well, fit and healthy. Discipline yourself to engage regularly in your preferred sport or exercise. Maintain good nutritional balance.
4. Sharpen your focus on what matters.
5. Reinvent what you do and how you do it.
6. Discover alliances that are based in true value and trust.
7. Re-examine your beliefs: do they stand the test of the times? Do they deliver you to the right place in yourself? Test new assumptions about life, about work and about business.
8. Clarify the difference between ‘musts’ and ‘wants’.
9. Let go, forgive and enjoy.
10. Discover that there is no reason for fear – here you are in tough times and you are managing, it is not the end of the world.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Sep.12.2008 :: Personal Growth, Tough Times :: 1 Comment »

I agree with 93% of what Marshal Goldsmith tells us in his “Advice for the young that transcends age” in BusinessWeek.

I agree that in an era of uncertainty, we all need to think like entrepreneurs. Second I agree that it is tough out there, and it’s only going to get tougher. Third I agree that you better forget about security.
And fourth I agree that it is a fairer and better world when millions of people from around the world are and will be getting the chance their parents never had.

Here is what I disagree with:

1. I disagree that you should “strive to survive”. I believe you are better off striving for much more than survival. Unless you strive to make a meaningful impact, to unlock your opportunities and to make the most of them, you begin to die even while you survive. How about striving for greatness, for meaning, for purpose, for a meaningful contribution?

2. I disagree that you should “forget about taking a year off.” If you have an opportunity for a learning adventure, a year off the trodden path and breaking away from the rat race might be the best move you can make to help your career development and opportunities. You can make this not a “year off” but rather a “year on” about life, living and learning.

3. I disagree that you should not be finding yourself during your adult years. You can “find yourself” inside anything you do. The first creativity is in re-creating you. Beyond the great surge of the globalized economy and consumerism, we are about to see a great surge in people’s desire for connection, meaning, true impact, beauty, inspiration and for simply being able to create a peace of mind. The next two decades are about to unleash a new wave in this globalization surge – the resurgence of art and culture and integral development, with new scientific breakthroughs and innovation on all fronts to facilitate these higher human needs. Do not give up on these essentials. The price of giving up is too high. You will be thriving but dead.

Investing in what you are about, in what you believe in, and in your growth and development is the best way to invest your time and money in your future. The future is not a repetition of the past. Subscribing to the mindset that helped our grandparents to survive the Depression is not the best approach. Instead, try to glean what the future is bringing and what mindsets are useful to have now to be able to live and flourish in a global ecology, not just survive it.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Aug.23.2008 :: Entrepreneur, Personal Growth :: 1 Comment »

You get up, go to work, you manage your way forward, you lead and you follow. You persuade and agree, and overcome challenges, you create solutions, and you hope for a good day. This is it. Stop looking for a spiritual experience. This is what you came here for. You are here to discover what you need to learn. You are here to influence, be influenced, change and be changed. This is it. You are in the experience of life. You are more than a human being looking for a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.

Your work, your journey as a parent, as a partner, as a leader is the human experience you offer to your spirit.  Being a human is the gift of entering the realm of change, wherein you can grow and develop. That’s what you came here for. To learn patience. To learn how to listen. To learn to cope with pain, recover from setbacks. To develop the capacity to appreciate, feel and perceive new things. To make the higher choices. To forgive. You are here to create art and beauty. To learn and teach understanding. You are here to generate innovative solutions. To help make the impossible possible. You are here to help the human enterprise move forward. And to help you move forward. You are a spirit in a human body for this purpose.

You are here to find your gifts. You are here to express your gifts in a way only you can in this earthly realm of choice. To gain the experience of expressing your gifts and the powers endowed to you and to discover what that will crystallize in you. You are here to love and to learn to be loved. This is it. It is your spirit being granted a human experience.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Aug.08.2008 :: Personal Growth, Spirituality :: 1 Comment »

Every important decision has to be made three times. If you act on an important decision without a complete journey through the three yeses, your decision and action may not be as intact and strong as it can be.

Let’s take the buying of your house for example. First you had the instinctive ‘yes, I like this house’, on your first visit.

This first decision is a gut decision. Does it feel right or not?

Then, you asked yourself on the following morning – ‘do I still feel positive about this house?’ The subconscious mind is slower than your gut instinct. It brings forward its concerns the following morning. That’s why people say, ‘I need to sleep on it’. It’s a way of saying ‘I need to get to my second yes.’ This is the second decision point. In the case of the house, possibly you have gone to see the house for the second time, to find out what the neighborhood looks like at a different time of the day.

The second decision, your second yes is when you earnestly engage in the conversation.

You are then at the point of making an offer. Your offer is contingent on an inspection. The purpose of the inspection is to see all the things that you cannot see, to flag all the possible problems.  This brings you to the third decision point.  The third yes is reached by the elimination of all objections and possible stoppers. This is the yes found by completing your due diligence.

The first decision is at the point. The ‘first yes’ is instinctive and quick.
The second decision is upon reflecting the following morning, or after a couple of days. The ‘second yes’ is a little slower and takes a while to find.
The third decision is after having completed your due diligence. This ‘third yes’ is the slowest. It takes as long as it takes to remove doubts and find the assurance about the positive long term prospect of the decision.

Do not bring analysis-paralysis to the third yes. Due diligence is assessing and evaluating all the known factors and then quantifying the unknowables and guestimating their risk-reward ratio. Once you found the third yes, learn to take action and move forward without looking back.

Now you can use this insight in your internal dialogue and conversation with others. On important matters, ask yourself: “Have I completed my three yeses?”

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Aug.05.2008 :: Entrepreneur, Personal Growth, Strategy :: 1 Comment »

On a recent flight the woman sitting next to my wife was telling her about her daughter. The daughter had finished seven years of study to become a chiropractor. After completing her studies and graduating she decided she did not want to practice. She discovered she doesn’t like touching other people.

It took seven years to find out that she doesn’t like touching people. This is not a unique story. There are many doctors, lawyers and other professionals who discover they don’t like the field that they studied and certified to practice in.

But why? Why would it take someone seven years to find out that they are directing their effort, time, money and dedication toward something that they will hate or at the very least, not enjoy doing? Why spend so much time to discover you don’t like touching people? Did the daughter study this field to satisfy her mother? Did she become a doctor against her own wishes, was there some underlying indoctrination or false projection about being a chiropractic doctor that didn’t match the reality?

In this particular situation, these are all guesses because we don’t know. What we do know is that people can be so distanced from themselves that they don’t know the first thing about what they are like, what their natural inclinations and talents are, what energizes them and what they would enjoy doing.

The journey of life is about finding out what we are like, discovering our talents, and learning about our gifts. The task we face is to be able to fast-forward this discovery process whenever we can, because we can then share more of our gifts in the precious little time we have here on Earth. This is the journey - find out what you love doing, what energizes you, what your purpose is; and then do it fully.

The challenge is to fast-forward the learning:
Are you where you ought to be? Are you learning and growing?
Do you feel distanced from yourself or do you feel in touch, true to your gifts?
Have you found what you are here to do, how you are here to make a difference?

Do not doubt for a second that you are here for a reason; that you are here to use your gifts to make a difference.

Here are some steps for you:
1. Make a list of all the things you enjoy doing.
2. Trace everything you have ever excelled at doing. Think back to the beginning of your career, and earlier to school. What were you good at?
3. What are the things that you look forward to doing, what activities do you make a point of not missing?
4. Discover the convergence of 1 and 2 and 3.
5. Look for opportunities to express your talent and interest. These opportunities may be present inside what you already do. Look at what you do in a new way.
6. Give yourself a chance to try something new.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: May.07.2008 :: Personal Growth :: No Comments »

What’s better than making decisions?

What is more fun, more powerful and more creative than getting up in the morning and thinking that what you’ve got to do today is to make decisions?

Making decisions is great but even more fun, more energizing and more creative is to have the mindset that today you don’t need to make decisions – that today your endeavor is to GENERATE OPTIONS.

What’s my point? Decision making is overrated. The bigger art in business and in living is to generate options. Great leadership and smart strategy is generating options. When you create options and clarify your vision, your values and your principles, you really don’t need to make many decisions. Instead of you having to make each decision, you let the decision present itself and come to you. I don’t mean which brand of toothpaste to get; the industry has done a very good job in that area and we are presented with many (some might say, too many) options. Therefore, which toothpaste to use is indeed a tough decision. What I am talking about are the bigger, more important directional things in life.

I asked our son who is now in his third year in college, what he wanted to do after he graduates. His reply was, “Right now I am creating options for myself. The best thing I can do at this time, is to do well both academically and in everything else I am involved in whether at school or personally. By excelling in what I do I create more options for me.” Here is his self briefing:

1. Do what I do well.
2. Discover what I am succeeding at.
3. Discover what I am interested in, what energizes me.
4. Meet interesting people and have interesting conversations.
5. The four points above will bring the widest range and best options.

This is a smart mindset.

You don’t see the tree in the forest needing to make decisions. It grows in all possible directions. The roots find the best path to deepen and the branches follow the optimal path for sunlight exposure, depending on the competition and density in the forest canopy.

How about this as a mindset? How about growing in all directions? How about generating a wide range of options? How about letting the environment tell you which are the best options?

Decision then is a confirmation of the obvious. A “yes” to what presents itself as the best option. I agree, sometimes you need to make tough decisions but a good seven or eight out of ten decisions need not be more than confirming the obvious best option. You can then get on with generating options up the path you are pursuing. It’s a different way of thinking. A more energizing way to live. A smarter strategy and a better way to run your business.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Apr.23.2008 :: Entrepreneur, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

The greatest pragmatism in the world is to have a dream you work toward realizing. To say, “I don’t dream. I deal in reality.” is to negate your power and to deny your ability to transform reality. Your ability to work and to realize your purpose and dream is the most real thing in the world. It is reality.

Put differently, without idealism, a “realistic” and “pragmatic” approach does not mean much. Idealism is about having a dream, a passionate purpose. Realism is about what is. Pragmatism is about what works, what gets results. It turns out that what is and what works is to take action towards a purpose, a vision, a dream you feel strongly about. Small, consistent, focused actions towards your dream are the real path forward. It is pragmatic idealism. The greatest pragmatism in the world.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Apr.03.2008 :: Entrepreneur, Happiness, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

It’s amazing and rather sad how new forms of addiction join the officially recognized list of addictions every year. We should all stop and ask - what does this picture tell us about the human condition? Why are so many people so out of balance?

Are you addicted to your blackberry (crackberry)? Do you have an “involuntary habit” of checking your Smartphone every 64 seconds? Do you check messages at traffic lights? Do you wake up in the middle of the night to check your messages?

Like with any other addiction, crackberry addiction has side effects and consequences that range from mild to severe and to completely debilitating. Here are some of the dangers and possible consequences of the Crackberry Addiction:

1. Compulsively micromanaging your people.
2. Becoming a disruptive manager and stifling people’s initiative and motivation.
3. Managing the now with an obsessive need for instant report back on every detail instead of focusing ahead.
4. Unwillingness of your people to make decisions they are capable of making because they need your confirmation.
5. Diminishing your own creativity and the creative capacity of those around you.
6. Replacing meaningful conversations with Chatberry.
7. Sacrificing quality coaching and genuine leadership development and holding people back from developing their potential.
8. Building a culture of dependency and preventing the distribution of power and trust in the organization.
9. Confusing “Being Busy” with “Being Effective”.
10. Being so preoccupied with the present that you do not dedicate time and mental resources toward creating a vision and a strategy of realizing it.

Take action
1. Cut back on the use of your Smartphone / crackberry.
2. Create blackberry free meetings.
3. Put it away when you are at home.
4. Discover how productive you can be without Blackberry.
5. If you don’t believe any of this, keep a log for a week. Chart the amount and number of times you spent checking email. Then, take action to reclaim time to think, to connect, to coach and to enjoy what you do.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Mar.07.2008 :: Personal Growth :: No Comments »